Authoritianism based on an emergenc that prevents civil rights such as freedom of assembly and movement. Censorship. Lockdown. Those set the tone. Media and corporations that need to censor what people say to combat disinformation.

Later we get the wet dream of surveillance with V passports. Social credit style. If you watched the ads companies were trying, you would've seen it. But of course you're going to call me a conspiracy theorists just like it happened back then.

Locking down your devices, putting age restrictions and therefore digital id and no privacy to access the internet, it's all pretty convenient.

But hey, Google is doing this all for your own good, or they aren't and the good EU will stop them because there's no way they'd like control.

Yes. They were. V passports. Censorship of so called disinformation.

I don't give a flying fuck if you dismiss me. You already did in 2020, 2021 and so on and I'm still here, didn't you?

Now I get to see you move uncomfortably while still ready to lick the next boot.

Enjoy it.

Canada doesn't have a direct, systematic way of blocking these transactions in the same way how other western countries are building up their systems. Your example was only made possible after the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which was shortly repealed. Whether using the EA was justified is still hotly debated, but most Ottawans living there at the time would agree that it was. This wasn't just a "wrong political protest", like the government punished people for having the wrong political opinion. Right-wing and far-right protests happen all the time in a political place like Ottawa. The issue here was the scale and the intensity - it was less a defined protest event and more of an attempt to settle in Ottawa for an indeterminate amount of time, complete with harassing locals while demanding accommodation to not freeze in the winter nights. I wouldn't be surprised if those "peaceful protestors" gave a lot of the downtown residents hearing or lung damage. The restrictions that came into effect then seem more like the exception than the rule, the government isn't by default authorized to do whatever. Even in something that had so little support, the pushback against the government's response was considerable. So I wouldn't portray any of it as something systemic or easy to do, like what some other nations are building up in their push towards authoritarianism.

I agree that in general the world is moving towards more authoritarianism and control in all facets, but I think Canada is still solidly lagging behind their friends in the UK, US, Australia and some EU countries. We still have no internet censorship authority. There is still hope to push back internet regulation a bit, even though it's obvious it won't last forever. The bills to clamp down will just be reintroduced over and over again until one of them passes. Still, banking bans are unlikely to come anytime soon, unless the people decide to threaten a whole city and the national government by putting on another J6 reenactment.